Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

Drake Wolfe says he learned to adapt before he learned much of anything else. Over 15 years in the foster care system, he lived with eight families across the country. At 18, he aged out, joining roughly 23,000 young people who leave state custody each year with no permanent family to return to.

But unlike the grim statistics surrounding children who age out of foster care, Wolfe is truly defying the odds. He grew up to become a serial entrepreneur, the founder of a non-profit foundation, and an author.

However, getting to that point was no walk in the park.

“I became homeless for a short period of time,” Wolfe said. “It’s pretty common, unfortunately, for kids who don’t get adopted. So I ended up sleeping in a library near the Pocono Mountains.”

He was looking for the basics: food, clothing, a place to stay, and coming up short. One night, a librarian named Sarah offered him a couch, and a sense of kindness he hadn’t experienced much of in his life.

“It was unconditional love and kindness for no reason,” Wolfe said. “That was the first time I had ever felt that.”

That, in his telling, was the turn. It was the launchpad for the startup he is building in Nashville today, one that is centered on making lives better for humans.

But a lot has happened between that night in the Pocono Mountains and now. Thanks to the help of a stranger, Wolfe shared the story of how he got back up on his feet– he spent a couple of years at a Christian college in Missouri, started working in construction, ascended in the ranks, and eventually became a hyperscale consultant.

From construction sites to code

Wolfe spent about six years consulting in construction, working with teams, rolling out technology packages, and coding on the side. By 2022, most of his work was virtual, so he visited a few cities that interested him — New York, Chicago, Houston, Nashville.

“Nashville, I just fell in love with it so much that I packed my bags and moved,” he said.

He credits the adaptability he built as a kid for how he operates now.

“I also look at failure very differently. I’m really not afraid to try anything,” he said. “I have very ambitious goals, and I don’t care if people think I’m crazy.”

Building a company that builds companies

That ambition became Elysium Labs, which Wolfe describes as an “AI venture studio.” The premise behind it is a company whose product is other companies.

“I wanted to build the coolest technology company in Tennessee,” he said. “And I was determined to get together the most adventurous group of entrepreneurs to do it.”

The model, as he lays it out: the team builds software around an idea, spends 12 to 18 months scaling it, then either sells it through merger and acquisition firms or keeps it in the portfolio. And Wolfe’s target is particularly aggressive — one new company every 30 days.

The flagship product, called Solo, is set to launch this summer. Wolfe calls it a fully autonomous AI operating system for solopreneurs, built to take over the marketing, sales, and product tasks a single founder would otherwise juggle alone.

“With Solo, we’ve created a solution that takes your already existing small business, plugs it into hundreds of world-class AI agents and enables them to work around the clock,” he said. He said the company plans to price it at roughly the cost of a cup of coffee a day.

“A full circle moment”

Elysium Labs has been self-funded so far, Wolfe said, with six partners on board. He said the company plans to open a Wefunder campaign so that anyone — accredited investor or not — can take a stake.

For Wolfe, the venture is inseparable from where he started.

“It proves to me that I can bet on myself, because I’ve beaten the odds every single time, no matter what,” he said.

We asked Wolfe what he would say to other young adults aging out of the foster care system.

“You can be whatever you want to be. Don’t let your environmental circumstances guide the way that you live your adult life,” he said. “You can heal from those wounds, and you can move on.”